Before you try and monetize a platform, the first thing that you must have is an e-mail subscriber base. Some people can generate six figures with only a few hundred subscribers and, other times, people struggle to make money with many thousands of e-mail subscribers. The size of your e-mail subscriber base is not what is important, but rather having a realistic strategy is what is important. Monetizing your content and gaining freedom in your life requires a web hosting provider that offers serious online tools for your website or blog.

Best Ways to Monetize, Pros and Cons of Making Money Online First off, everyone on the Internet is in separate camps when it comes to their money-making strategies. Many of the strategies work in some form or fashion, but in order to be successful in the long-run, you need to find out what works best for you.

1. Sponsorships and Advertising

Pros: If you are lucky enough and persistent enough to get a sponsor or advertiser, it could be a huge revenue windfall for you.

Cons: Your life now depends on that revenue windfall. If your advertiser or sponsor changes their mind, you can lose some serious revenue, which means you are out of tons of money and potentially out of business. Why? Because you no longer control your own revenue.

2. One-on-One Personal Coaching or Consulting

Pros: Easiest monetization strategy to start. This strategy works well in the short run and you can generate revenue quickly.

Cons: Trading dollars for hours and anyone who works with customers or clients knows that in this scenario, you are no longer living by your own rules or by your own schedule. With this model, there is a glass ceiling because you have a finite amount of hours of which to monetize.

3. Affiliate deals and promoting other people and getting paid per sale

Pros: More potential revenue down the line

Cons: Lack of control. It is not 100% dependent on you.

4. Online Events or In-Person Events

Pros: Generate great revenue, help people, pride and a sense of accomplishment

Cons: This model is expensive to get started. After the event is over, it’s over. You have to constantly re-invent yourself. You can’t really sell online recordings of something that occurred ten months ago, for example, unless you have a subject or topic that is “evergreen”.

5. Your Own Products: Examples include software, an online course or information that you package up for sale, or some unique knowledge that other people will be interested in.

Options include:

a) a model in which you teach everything,

b) offer a hybrid of your teaching and a guest speaker,

c) offer a live component

Pros: You can do a ton of work up-front, but get paid for it over and over again without taking more of your time. It really does well as long as you are promoting it without necessarily take more of your time. You are not trading your time for money. This type of monetization strategy pays the most, which also means you need fewer customers to generate revenue.

Cons: Marketing and promoting a course takes time and a lot of effort. You need to wear many hats, create the product, promote, customer service, and other roles require a lot of different skills.

Launch it, sell it, close it. This model is what a lot of Internet entrepreneurs like best. Generating freedom for yourself and having the ability for people to access the course whenever they want is an awesome feeling of freedom. Your clients get everything and you, the entrepreneur, do not have to re-record everything over and over again. Evergreen is “key” to monetizing your content to freedom.

What do you charge?

You want to be at the premium end of your market. You want to have premium clients. Do you want to be the cheapest on the block or the premium? What is your market and look at the higher end of the market? Look at those price points. You want to be in that premium range.

When you go out to market and promote something, it is going to be just as hard to market and promote something that costs $4 as it will be to market and promote something that costs $49. When you are packaging up your product, think about all the time and effort that you are saving your customers. Your product is valuable, so do not sell yourself short. You do not need to start with lower-end products and then move to a premium. You can come out of the gate with something strong. Take pride in your business and take pride in offering results to your clients.

So, now that we know the best ways to monetize and make money online, let’s get down to the specific details about how to accomplish it.

Overcome the “Similar Complex” Overcoming the “who are you” projection will increase the likelihood that you will be successful. Is your website professional looking or does it appear as a template that you just threw up online without customizing? Random templates are not helpful in making your brand stand out. Having a brand that looks good and portrays the impression that you are serious is crucial.

Your website needs to look professional so that your visitors will realize that you are serious about your brand. Does your website look like something that people will want to buy from? Is your website professionally designed? Is your website hosted by a reliable web hosting firm? Does your website stand out among the myriad of websites online today?

If your website looks plain, is often down, does not have an e-mail subscriber form, or has broken links and does not provide the visitor with a unique experience, then you will need to re-group and consider ways to improve your professional image online.

Add a Sitemap to Help Google Index your Content The search engine fairy does not just come down and “ordain” you and grant you traffic. It doesn’t work that way. Instead, with careful planning and a lot of hard work, you can build an audience, a brand, and a community which you can then monetize. Add a sitemap to help Google index your relevant pages, videos, and images. There are many WordPress sitemap plugins which will help you to build an XML sitemap, which is the file type that Google Webmaster Tools prefers wordpress seo.

On the world wide web, Internet entrepreneurs who are good at creating content and building an audience often struggle with the question of building that traffic into a sustainable and profitable business. Often times speaking, coaching, sponsorships, partnerships, online events, and online courses are thought of as the best ways to monetize a brand online. It is true, these strategies can be effective and profitable, but in the long-term, you must find out (usually through trial and error) which strategy you enjoy the most. By solving the mystery of which monetization strategy you enjoy, you can increase your chances of being successful at it and gaining true freedom and wordpress search engine optimization.

Three types of most popular web content:

Images

Articles

YouTube videos

So, now that we know what we must do before getting started and what is needed to lay the groundwork for making money online, let’s learn how to monetize valuable content.

You may ask… why me? Am I ready? I am waiting for the perfect time, the perfect moment, and the ideal situation. That does not exist. It is a myth. But, by having a brand in place, having an audience in place, and a reliable and consistent schedule for adding content, you are as close to the perfect time as you are going to get to monetize your content.

Images: Google Image Search and Monetizing your Images

Google Image search can be one of your greatest traffic sources.

If you have a website that has an audience, then most likely you have plenty of high-quality well-selected images for your website or blog. But many bloggers or website owners are unsure of exactly how to monetize images not only to grow traffic but also to generate an income.

Many bloggers use WordPress. It is the most popular blogging content management system on the Internet today. People use images as a way to complement their articles and create interest. The question is, however, how can a blogger take those images to build an audience? Traditionally, bloggers were encouraged by their marketing staff to never include text on their images. Because after all, search engine bots can not read the text on images. But that strategy has changed with the dawn of the social media era wordpress seo plugins. Pinterest, for example, has evolved into one of the fastest growing social media networks and it is the quickest way, second only to Twitter, to build an audience fast!

Steps to monetize images:

The first step is to upload images to your website or blog along with descriptive text for the image. Make sure that your image is searchable and public. When you upload the image, make sure that the web page which contains your image is publicly accessible. This pertains to social networks too. For example, if you upload an image to Google+ make sure that your privacy settings are set to “Public”.

The second step is to take advantage of existing web pages that you have worked on over the years to monetize the images that you have already uploaded. Most bloggers utilize WordPress for their publishing. WordPress plug-in allows you to display a “pin it” image when people hover over images on your WordPress blog. The name of the plug-in is called “Jquery Pin-It button for Images”. This allows you to do a lot of customizations such as do you want your images to show up on posts or categories. You can also show the minimal revolution of which you want the Pin-It button to show up. For example wordpress seo tips, you can set it to show up the Pin-It button on images that are larger than 200px x 200px. You can also specify where you want the Pin-It button to appear on your page.

What should you write about?

Write about something you know well, enjoy and can continue to learn. The main way to generate revenue through articles is by writing about something you know. Do people ask you questions about a certain topic? On social media outlets, when people want to find the answer about a certain topic, they will ask someone whom they consider to be the authority in that field. As soon as you realize that there is an opportunity for you to take something you have already done, package it up and teach it to other people, you are one step closer to the ultimate freedom. Offer your visitors results, then generate revenue. It is incredibly powerful.

What unique experiences have you done or done for someone else? That is what you should write about and focus on. Although you might not consider yourself an “expert”, when you make the shift to understanding that you know something valuable which can be taught to people, you are in a much more powerful position to generate revenue.

Rather than having your content be a “hobby”, you are positioned very well. It is something that you can realistically achieve. Make money off of your online content. The hard part is building an audience, bulging a community of people that trust you. Generating great content is the hard part. If you already have the platform, you are more than 50% there, so people in this situation need to set up a strategy for monetizing their content. It is very obtainable for people in this situation.

The struggling point, however, is lacking a real strategy to generate revenue. So, build the platform and once you have done this, you can do anything. Most people that market products pay people who have the platform to introduce their products. So, if you already have the platform, then you can accomplish a lot because building the platform is the hard part. Think about the people who are individuals with their own brand. Those are the people that can really rise to the top of financial freedom.

Over time as your community evolves and grows and you go on your journey of building content and an audience, many bloggers, podcasters and YouTuber’s struggle with how to channel their community, take their content and audience to make money online. There are so many ways that you can monetize a platform so it does not come down to which one is best but rather by discovering the strategy you enjoy most.

YouTube Videos:

YouTube videos that are 3-6 minute videos that cover a specific content or thought are popular for monetization, especially a channel that has new, quality videos added on a consistent basis.

Steps to monetize videos:

Create your YouTube channel.

Upload your well-created, original videos.

Select the videos that you want to monetize. Once you have selected those videos, click “monetize” in YouTube. YouTube will place ads on your videos and depend on how many visitors you have, you make money from that video channel. You will get paid a commission for each click that you generate from your videos. In order to see the analytics, login to your video manager in YouTube and you will see earning records and analytics. This will help you to determine which type of videos are making the most revenue. This helps you know what type of videos to create in the future.

If you are an Internet Marketer who has figured out how to make money but you do not have great content, you deserve big congrats. But, if you are like the rest of us, you need great content in order to make money online. You need to have a professional looking website to build your brand and promote your packaged product.